Reputable websites for antivirus top lists and tests

Digmor Crusher said:

Nope, there are other excellent anti-virus products such as Kaspersky, Bitdefender, Eset and FSecure .

They all require payment and free versions ship with adds telling you that your protection is "limited" unless you pay.

The payment would be justified if the difference between detection rate would be 10% or more but this is far from being the case, so what one really pays is a very tiny percentage of additional protection or features which is not worth it, or better to say a sense of enhanced security.

Is there any paid AV feature that is not available in Windows? so what exactly is being paid?

Digmor Crusher said:

I was just answering the question about alternatives, no where in the question was the word "free" mentioned.

Ah OK, I didn't mean any offense, but what x509 said sounded like he's pissed of for paying and then being asked for more payment.
I only say that these AV products are in essence all the same and perhaps not worthy alternatives.

Some third-party AVs offer additional features such as VPN, anti-phishing, ...
I have never heard anybody say that they had any additional protection against malware. And testers such as AV-TEST | Antivirus & Security Software & AntiMalware Reviews generally rate Defender as giving the same excellent level of protection as the others.



Denis

Carmano said:

Microsoft lists "enhanced security options" as a feature of Microsoft 365.
For those of us that don't subscribe to Microsoft 365, should we be paying an annual fee to a third-party AV company (like Symantec) or stick with the "free" Windows Defender (or whatever they're calling it today) and wonder what protection we're doing without?

This is the MS description of that enhanced security
Microsoft Defender - Microsoft365
I cannot see anything beneficial in it.


Denis

Try3 said:

Some third-party AVs offer additional features such as VPN, anti-phishing, ...
And testers such as AV-TEST | Antivirus & Security Software & AntiMalware Reviews generally rate Defender as giving the same excellent level of protection as the others.

I always wondered why all antivirus companies fare the same?
There are millions of malware online, how is that they all find the same malware?
Why one doesn't find that the other does not?

Carmano said:

Microsoft lists "enhanced security options" as a feature of Microsoft 365.

Seems like Denis already answered this, but I'm also not aware of any MS 365 protection, the only paid protection that MS provides is Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mi...o365-worldwide

Fun fact is that all those additional protections for defender can be enabled in GPO without having to pay, the only thing you get by paying is additional visuals which let you manage more computers and things such as malware graphs etc. which we don't have in Windows defender.

zebal said:

... how is that they all find the same malware?

We don't know if they do or they don't.

In av-test's case, they rate detections overall without identifying which was found by which AV package.
- At the moment, they say the industry average detection is 99.4% but Defender & several others detected 100% of the samples av-test threw at them.
- If, in the June/July tests, Defender & Norton only detect 99.9% of the samples, av-test will not say which ones they fail to detect or whether or not they both fail to detect the same ones.

You can see the detailed results for each package by clicking on the little arrow next to each entry in their results tables




All the best,
Denis